By permitting fraud we betray democracy

The increase in postal-vote fraud is an urgent and dangerous issue, argues
Andrew Gilligan.

At the European elections, less than a year ago, the electoral roll of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets contained 148,970 names. By January this year, it had shot up to 160,278. And in the past month alone, a further 5,000 new names have mysteriously appeared on the voting lists.

There are only two possibilities here. Either Tower Hamlets is growing twice as fast as the fastest-growing city in China, or it is the target of massive and systematic electoral fraud. We can have a guess at the answer from the fact that some three-bedroom flats in the borough appear to have 12 adults on the roll. The real occupants, when approached on the doorstep, have never heard of their 10 new flatmates.

Elections in Tower Hamlets have always been a scandal. In 2006, an entire tower block had its postal votes stolen. But this time it's more serious. In a close election, Tower Hamlets – and other places like it – could help tip the balance of power. And there are now rather too many other places like it, with dozens of police inquiries under way in inner-city seats across the country. At the time of writing, I don't know how Britain has voted. But under some scenarios, the real and frightening possibility is that this election was decided by fraud.

There are local factors, too. As the Telegraph has documented, the Islamic Forum of Europe, a radical Islamist group based at the hardline East London Mosque, has been accused of secretly infiltrating the Tower Hamlets Labour Party – and is seeking to consolidate its control by having the borough run by a directly elected mayor. A referendum on the mayoral proposal was also held yesterday.

I have no evidence that the IFE is behind the fraud in Tower Hamlets. But its favoured candidates have done remarkably well lately. At the last London mayoral election, Ken Livingstone, for whom leading members of the IFE vigorously campaigned, saw his share of the vote in one ward rise from 29.6 per cent to a rather improbable 68.1 per cent.

The problem is simple. Panicked by falling turnout, Labour allowed postal voting on demand. But a postal vote is a thousand times easier to rig than a vote cast in person. At a polling station, you need a different body for each fake voter. With a postal vote, all you need is a different envelope, and perhaps not even that.

Non-existent electors are only the half of it. By all but abolishing the secrecy of the ballot, postal voting opens the door to threats, pressure and outright vote-buying. If you vote in a polling station, nobody can make you show them your ballot paper. Nobody can know if you've obeyed orders or not.

Worst of all, though, is that the authorities don't seem to care. Police inquiries seldom get anywhere. After the 2006 scandals, one minister said that allegations of electoral fraud risked "undermining confidence". In the most dishonest press release I have ever seen, the Islamist-influenced Tower Hamlets council claimed that an election tribunal had found "no evidence of electoral fraud in Tower Hamlets". Actually, the judge ruled that there was "clear, prima facie evidence" for it.

Our rulers have tiptoed round this subject because voting fraud is mostly a problem – for now – in Asian areas. But what they're actually saying, if you think about it, is that it's all right for Asians to have their votes stolen – not a view that most Asian voters would share.

To avoid "undermining confidence" in democracy itself, we need change. For future elections, postal voting on demand should be suspended in Tower Hamlets, in Birmingham, in the Northern mill towns and anywhere else where problems arise. Nobody in these places is more than a short walk from a polling station. If we do not act, we are effectively in league with the vote-stealers.